Journal article
Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia
NJ Abram, BJ Henley, AS Gupta, TJR Lippmann, H Clarke, AJ Dowdy, JJ Sharples, RH Nolan, T Zhang, MJ Wooster, JB Wurtzel, KJ Meissner, AJ Pitman, AM Ukkola, BP Murphy, NJ Tapper, MM Boer
Communications Earth and Environment | Published : 2021
Abstract
The 2019/20 Black Summer bushfire disaster in southeast Australia was unprecedented: the extensive area of forest burnt, the radiative power of the fires, and the extraordinary number of fires that developed into extreme pyroconvective events were all unmatched in the historical record. Australia’s hottest and driest year on record, 2019, was characterised by exceptionally dry fuel loads that primed the landscape to burn when exposed to dangerous fire weather and ignition. The combination of climate variability and long-term climate trends generated the climate extremes experienced in 2019, and the compounding effects of two or more modes of climate variability in their fire-promoting phases..
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Grants
Awarded by NSW Department of Primary Industries
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the Australian Research Council for funding support through the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CE170100023), a Future Fellowship to N.J.A. (FT160100029), and Discovery Indigenous grants to J.J.S. (IN140100011, IN160100029). We also thank the Australian Research Council and partner organisations for Linkage Project support to B.J.H. (LP150100062), the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub for support to M.M.B., R.H.N. and H.C., the Earth Systems and Climate Change (ESCC) Hub of the National Environmental Science Programme (NESP) for support to A.J.D, and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre for support to J.J.S. We thank Robert Whelan and Richard Williams (NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub), Lynetter Bettio, Acacia Pepler and Robert Colman (Bureau of Meteorology), and Anthony Clark and Jason Crean (NSW Department of Primary Industries) for their reviews of this manuscript prior to submission.